Interesting video. Althought in the USA there are allot of local business directories in my country, Portugal, the directories are very generalistic. Our biggest search engine doesn't have what a local business directory.

Mainly everything is separated by category and that's enought for them.

On other note. I'm 100% deaf on my right side. So I had a litle bit of a struggle to listen to the conversation as the sound of the mics came out separatly on each earing plug of my headphones. Any way to fix that?

I agree that big newspaper websites should have their own link api but if i'm not wrong tinyURL allows the user to specify the URL such as tinyURL.com/QuantumPhisycsArticle and they may include initials for some branding like tinyURL.com/NYPQuantumPhisycsArticle.

The big issues are that if for any reason tinyURL is down there will be millions of viewers that might not be able to access certain content / link.

The best solution, in my opinion, is developing an API that will allow some control and that is internal not an external source.